How a Conservative Paper Ended Up Endorsing Hillary Clinton

This year, for the first time in the Arizona Republic’s history, the paper’s editorial board endorsed a Democrat for President.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MELINA MARA / THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY

Two months ago, after the Houston Chronicleannounced its endorsement of Hillary Clinton for President of the United States, the director of the editorial page of the ArizonaRepublic, Phil Boas, contacted a prominent state historian. He wanted help determining whether his paper had ever endorsed a Democratic Presidential candidate in its hundred-and-twenty-six-year history. The Phoenix-based, conservative-leaning newspaper, which has the largest circulation in the state, was once called the ArizonaRepublican, and it had backed every Republican candidate for President going back as far as anyone at the paper could remember. But what about, say, the contest between Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, in 1892, two years after the paper’s founding?

“We’d never done the spadework,” Boas said this morning, two days after the paper’s nine-person editorial boardendorsed Clinton. “It’s not an easy thing to figure out.” Boas knew “that there would be special power to an endorsement of Clinton if we had never endorsed a Democrat.” And, when the historian and another researcher delivered their report, he learned that indeed that was the case.

As Boas and the rest of the board waited for that report, other historically conservative papers around the country—including the Republic_’s_ “sister paper,” the Cincinnati Enquirer, and the Dallas Morning News, which merely “recommends” candidates to its readers—came out with their own surprising editorials in favor of Clinton. “All of us were coming to the same conclusion,” Boas said. “There is something extraordinary about this Republican candidate that was making us all break from our history.”

Boas, who is fifty-seven and has lived in Arizona since he was three years old, has been on staff at the Republic since 1999, and has headed the editorial page since 2012. In October of that year, the paper published an endorsement of Mitt Romney, under his direction, which read, “We believe the nation’s best opportunity to escape the compounding woes of spiraling debt and economic stagnation lies with a president who believes in the free market’s capacity to heal its own wounds. That leader is Romney.” Boas describes himself as “a lifelong Republican” whose parents and grandparents were all Republicans as well. But the editorial board, he said, includes “a mix of viewpoints: we have conservatives, we have a libertarian, we have liberals.” There are five women and four people of color. “But, generally, we move in sort of a center-right way,” he told me. “Although we go left in some areas, like the environment.”

While weighing their endorsement options, the_ _Republic’s board members considered what they ultimately believed to be the half-dozen or so most crucial and telling moments from the campaign. The first of these happened in November of last year, when an African-American man was beaten at a Trump rally in Birmingham, Alabama. As Boas recalled, Trump, at the lectern, following the man’s beating, said, “Get him the hell out of here.” Shortly afterward, Trump went on Fox News and said of the man, “Maybe he should have been roughed up.” This prompted a series of editorials in the Republic that were critical of Trump. “We found, in that event, the bass notes of authoritarianism,” Boas told me. “It kind of raised the siren or the alarm for us: that this is a dangerous type of behavior we’re witnessing here, somebody who would incite political violence.”

Just a few days later, Trump mocked a New York Times reporter with a disability. “If my teen-age son had made fun of a disabled person like that, I would have been shocked, horrified,” Boas said. “For Trump to do that was beyond defensible.” Boas said that sort of behavior “would be a disqualifier for the mayor of Phoenix,” let alone the Presidency. The paper published another editorial lambasting the candidate.

Finally, there were Trump’s expressions of admiration for Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. “To embrace a man who is essentially a dictator now,” Boas, still shocked, said. “Who invades his neighbors. Who has probably ordered the assassination of journalists and dissidents. Who is a bad actor globally. Who is probably an enemy of the United States.” Boas said that the board found Trump’s comments “outrageous.”

The Republic’s editorial board eventually spent “dozens of hours” discussing the “twists and turns of the election” in secretive meetings that Boas compared to a “papal conclave.” Some discussions involved the entire board, while others were between just Boas and the publisher, Mi-Ai Parrish. Those two, along with the paper’s editor-in-chief, Nicole Carroll, form the “executive wing” of the board. (Parrish green-lighted every editorial that criticized Trump.) The ultimate decision to support Clinton was not unanimous, but Boas said that reaching a majority was not difficult and effectively happened months ago. “There’s often tension between the main board and the executive wing,” he explained. “And there wasn’t that tension. It was an easy thing to do.” He continued, “We see him as a dangerous guy who would roll back press freedoms, who has sworn to do that. If he would crush freedoms in one area, we have no doubt he’d do so in others.”

The board’s stated problems with Trump also include his extreme immigration proposals. The endorsement cited S.B. 1070, “the 2010 ‘show me your papers’ law that earned Arizona international condemnation and did nothing to resolve real problems with undocumented immigration,” and called for “a president who can broker solutions.”

Boas believes that many longtime Republicans who support Trump are in denial. “I hear it in their voices, the little qualifiers: ‘He’s not nearly as bad as she is.’ That kind of thing,” he said. “I know they know that he violates even their values. But they’re willing to make compromises because they so despise her.” The Republic, he added, was “not willing to make that compromise.” Clinton “treats the office with respect,” he said. “And Trump has no respect for the office that he seeks. And if the leaders of our country don’t respect our important institutions, no one is going to respect them. That’s why he scares us.”

Boas said that the prospect of the paper losing subscribers as a result of its unprecedented endorsement of a Democrat was not discussed internally, except as a “curiosity.” He went on, “Cincinnati took a hit. Dallas executives said they paid a price. So we knew that was coming. But it was never a consideration or a concern.” Politico reported today that the Republic has received death threats in response to the endorsement. Boas said that the overwhelming reaction from readers—by a margin of “about three to one”—has been negative, but that most of the negativity has been vulgar rather than violent: “One of the first e-mails I got,” he said, “was: ‘Let me make this short: F. U.’ It was spelled out, of course.”

Charles Bethea is a contributing writer for newyorker.com, and has written for The New Yorker since 2008.